After a week of squeezing through the dangerous, mazelike cave network, divers Mikko Paasi and Norrased Palasing emerged from its muddy waters Wednesday to find a cause for hope. There, huddled on a rock, their headtorches still illuminated, were five villagers who had been trapped, missing — u nknown if alive or dead — for eight days inside the flooded caves in Laos. “What a feeling!!!” wrote Paasi, who also played a role in the famous rescue of 12 schoolboys and their soccer coach from a Thai cave in 2018. “The task so far has been far from easy and everybody involved has done amazing work.” Finding the villagers provided only a “brief relief,” Paasi said on social media, with the five villagers yet to be extracted from the cave, and two others still missing. The survivors “are still in the terminal chamber, all healthy and in good spirits, but the extraction is still ahead and it ain’t going to be easy,” Paasi wrote on Instagram. “We need to dive straight back and bring the miners more supplies to gain strength and get ready for the way out.” The moment of the discovery was captured on video by Paasi and Palasing, the latter posting it to Facebook. The footage showed the two divers waist-deep in the opaque, brown water, a rarity being able to stand in the otherwise claustrophobic cave system that’s often little wider than a human body. The villagers on the rock had ripped clothes and dirty faces, seemingly stunned that they had been found alive in this race against starvation and suffocation. Authorities said they had previously warned people in the central Xaisomboun province, north of the capital, Vientiane, not to go into the caves looking for gold. But on May 19, a group of seven had done so. Heavy rains and flash flooding blocked the entrance, triggering a search that has folded in several Lao groups as well as the Thai team involved in the 2018 rescue. Another video posted by one of the groups coordinating the search, Metta Tham Kalasin (MTK) Command and Control Center, showed a group of people aboveground exchanging hugs and punching the air, some of them falling to their knees and wiping away tears on hearing the news. Bounkham Luanglath of the Lao organization Rescue Volunteer for People, which has been working closely with local authorities in the rescue efforts, told The Associated Press that five people were found safe and alive but two more were still missing, and the search will continue for them. “I’m still shaking. Our team made it happen,” he said in a voice message to the news agency. The cave is a narrow chamber often visited by villagers searching for gold deposits, Bounkham had previously told the AP. He said that authorities had repeatedly warned people against entering the cave out of safety concerns. State-run Lao National Radio reported that Thai rescuers arrived at the site Sunday for assistance. Divers have since begun navigating flooded sections of the cave toward the area where they believe the group may be trapped. Laos, officially known as the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, is a one-party communist state. Its ministry for foreign affairs did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The Associated Press and Mahalia Dobson contributed. This story uses functionality that may not work in our app. Click here to open the story in your web browser. ...read more read less